Why Adolescents Take Risks

Current expert opinion on the adolescent decision-making process and how interventions may be better designed to help young people make better choices is summarized in a recently published article titled “Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making.”

Paradoxically, researchers find that adolescent risk taking is often fueled by rational judgments.

The report by Valerie F. Reyna (Cornell) and Frank Farley (Temple University) is published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

It is often believed that adolescents think they are immortal, just plain invulnerable to life’s slings and arrows. This notion is often used to explain why young people are liable to drive fast, have unprotected sex, smoke, or take drugs — risks that adults are somewhat more likely to shy away from.

Research shows that adolescents do exhibit an optimistic bias — that is, a tendency to underestimate their own risks relative to their peers. But this bias turns out to be no more prevalent in adolescents than in grownups; adults commit the very same fallacy in their reasoning.

And actually, studies on perception of risks by children, adolescents, and adults show that young people tend to overestimate their risks for a range of hazards (including car accidents and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS), both in absolute terms (i.e., as compared with actual risks) and relative to adults. Their estimation of vulnerability declines rather than increases with age.

So why do adolescents take risks? Decision research answers this with another counterintuitive finding: Adolescents make the risky judgments they do because they are actually, in some ways, more rational than adults. Grownups tend to quickly and intuitively grasp that certain risks (e.g., drunk driving, unprotected sex, and most anything involving sharks) are just too great to be worth thinking about, so they don’t proceed down the “slippery slope” of actually calculating the odds.

Adolescents, on the other hand, actually take the time to weigh risks and benefits — possibly deciding that the latter outweigh the former.

So adolescents engage in just the sort of calculations — trading off risks against benefits — that economists wish that all people would make. But economists notwithstanding, research is showing more and more that a faster, more intuitive, less strictly “rational” form of reasoning that comes with increased experience can often be more effective.

For example, for questions such as, is it a good idea to swim with sharks? Is it smart to drink a bottle of Drano? What about setting your hair on fire — is that a good thing to do? People of all ages are able to give the correct answer (it’s “no,” in case you were wondering) to each of these questions.

But adolescents take just a little bit longer (about 170 milliseconds longer, to be exact) to arrive at the right answer than adults do. That split second – the time when an adolescent may be weighing the risks v. benefits of an action, gives insight into how adolescents tick — and how they tick differently from adults.

Mature or experienced decision makers (e.g., experienced vs. less experience physicians) rely more on fuzzy reasoning, processing situations and problems as “gists” rather than weighing multiple factors and evidence. This leads to better decisions, not only in everyday life but also in places like emergency rooms where the speed and quality of risky decisions are critical.

These counterintuitive conclusions about the decision-making processes of young people have major implications for how to intervene to help steer them in the right direction.

In fact, interventions aimed at reducing smoking or unprotected sex in young people by presenting accurate risk data on lung-cancer and HIV may actually backfire if young people overestimate their risks anyway. Instead, interventions should focus on facilitating the development of mature, gist-based thinking in which dangerous risks are categorically avoided rather than weighed in a rational, deliberative way.

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About Rick Nauert PhD

Dr. Rick Nauert has over 25 years experience in clinical, administrative and academic healthcare. He is currently an associate professor for Rocky Mountain University of Health Professionals doctoral program in health promotion and wellness. Dr. Nauert began his career as a clinical physical therapist and served as a regional manager for a publicly traded multidisciplinary rehabilitation agency for 12 years. He has masters degrees in health-fitness management and healthcare administration and a doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin focused on health care informatics, health administration, health education and health policy. His research efforts included the area of telehealth with a specialty in disease management.